stealing fire (and the rest of your life)
by twistedservice
Summary: How twelve people became Prometheus and almost died for it. —Apocalypse Now tie-in


My journey into a 100 prompt long tie-in to Apocalypse Now aka yet another bad decision I've made because of how much time I spent on it.

God I'm terrible at notes and explanations now, aren't I?

Have fun.

* * *

 **1\. Beginnings.**

For a very long while, they're just twelve people.

You could pick any twelve people, out of any of the Districts, and it wouldn't go like this. It wouldn't look like this. But they're not just any twelve people, fortunately for them.

No one knows when they started blurring the line between designated squad and friends. No one knows when they leaped headfirst off the cliff labeled for family only. It's a dangerous place for equally dangerous people.

And no one really cares where the line is, anymore.

* * *

 **2\. First.**

Meritt puts a knife in someone's throat for the first time when he's eleven.

The Sentinel's have already had him for three years. Normally, when you're that young, they won't actually put you out into the field until you're twelve. He wonders if that's a by-product of the country they live in, if that age is just the unspoken rule for everything.

It's a routine training exercise, except the kid they just brought in two months ago is still terrified to his very core.

He doesn't put up much of a fight, and Meritt knows, somehow, that even if he survived the next ten years in this place he never would.

The kid almost looks grateful, when he sees the knife coming.

* * *

 **3\. Lightning.**

Kane Alverado is 18 years, 3 months, and 2 days old when he finally starts believing all that bullshit about floating above your body, when your body can't hold you anymore. He remembers the last time he closed his eyes, the knife sticking out of his abdomen. That's as far as the memories go. Somewhere along the way, in the car back, he dies.

Nothing comes any clearer than that one bit of knowledge. After that, it's all in pieces.

There's someone's hands on his chest. A lot of yelling. The screeching slide of tires on pavement. The back doors opening. Luca grabbing Meritt and ripping him away, practically dragging him back from him once they're inside. His body, really. He looks dead. He _is_ dead.

Someone's crying. Hollis. Luca's still holding Meritt. Alessia comes charging in, shoving something into Mac's hands. Everything's moving too fast for him to really keep track of it.

He figures out what's about to happen a second before the lightning hits him.

* * *

 **4\. Bullet.**

In the second before his bullet (almost) kills Ferrox Mervaine, Luca wishes it would turn back and hit him instead.

* * *

 **5\. Together.**

It always happens eventually.

Every group gets a medic, a leader. That's the kind of shit everyone calls staples. After that it's a free for all. After that, a squad can become as rag-tag as it wants. Murderers or thieves, innocent or the scum of the earth, it doesn't matter.

They're all put together, square pieces refusing to give on any one side.

If only they knew how they'd feel in a few years.

* * *

 **6\. Separation.**

They remove Carnelia from Prometheus and put her with the Titans two weeks in. Meritt never asks why. He doesn't care, either.

* * *

 **7\. Resurface.**

Seren remembers the first person she killed outside the Games with too much clarity.

They're still living in the woods at this point. She has one gun and one knife and is maybe thirty feet away from where they all fell asleep when she sees a man, walking through the trees. It's always been hard to tell where Seven ends and where it begins. There's not enough fences.

Maybe he left on purpose, maybe not. But he takes one look at her and looks ready to go running. He's going to go back to Seven and scream to anyone that will listen that he saw her, and then they're all done for. Not just her.

He turns around to run, and she shoots him in the back of the head.

Everyone else comes running at the sound of the noise. He's dead before he even hits the forest floor but it takes her a lot longer than that to pull herself back out of the moment, to put her head back above water. The gunshot echoes in her ears when she tries to go to sleep that night, and every night after that.

After a while, it's a familiarity. An old friend. A reminder, of who she is and what she's doing.

People would call her a monster for it, but it's not a bad thing.

* * *

 **8\. Numb.**

Alessia arrives at the Sentinel's base with numb fingers that are dangerously close to frostbite and without two siblings, dead somewhere in the snow behind her.

When they take her, for no reason at all that she's figured out other than the fact that their numbers were dwindling too quickly, both of them are by her side. Her parents, even if they were there at that exact moment, would never have scraped up enough ambition to save them in the end. If they even really wanted to.

It's twenty below when they drag her outside, even colder than that when they finally get to the heart of the mountains, and she's so blind from the snow that she never even noticed they got left behind.

* * *

 **9\. Immortal.**

The details of them getting Meritt back are still fuzzy to him, years later.

Someone exchanges a trade between them and the Capitol, and suddenly Meritt is there. It's weird, for a while, before it's like he was never gone at all. They get him back and they're told to keep to themselves, far off in the woods, where they can hurt no one and touch nothing. Where the rest of the world will assume them dead, like they already do with Seren.

Luca wonders if a certain type of people in this world are incapable of being dead for long, and if Meritt is just one of many.

(He is.)

* * *

 **10\. Carnivore.**

Every other person at the base has an unnerving gleam in their eye.

It takes a certain kind of person to figure out which ones are dangerous or not. It's even harder to figure out which ones actually mean you harm, which ones will rip your throat out with their teeth if they're instructed to. It's a lot of them, in the very least.

And not enough people figure it out, before it happens.

* * *

 **11\. Clutch.**

It crosses her mind, somewhere between Eleven and Two, that she should've tried to steal the car before they got her and Orick anywhere close to the base.

Too little, too late. But that's the reason why she sneaks down to where they keep the cars and sits behind the steering wheel of one of the rover's for nearly an hour, trying to figure out what makes it work. She's sixteen, could almost be one of those Capitol girls who's so eager to go for a ride, if this was another time, another place.

Through the front windshield, Linnet can see the closed door. No way out. Not now, anyway.

One day, though, that door's going to be open. And one day she's driving out of it.

* * *

 **12\. Street.**

Someone picks Kane off the street when he's 14 and he thinks he'll never see the sun again.

It's his own fault. Someone walks up to you on the street and you're supposed to run in the opposite direction, not accept their offer of shelter. But it's pouring rain and his mother's funeral was thirty-three hours ago and he's tired. He's so tired.

He should have known better. But he never learns.

* * *

 **13\. Saint.**

Karsi won't even look Mac in the eye when she first meets him.

It's like most of them, except Fen, who had lit up like the star on top of the tree at the sight of him, or Audrel, who had looked bored to tears. But Karsi's not like them, though. She's not like any of them.

It's a rare thing, for them to throw someone so innocent into all of this. Someone who had done nothing wrong to begin with. But twenty of them became corpses a week ago under a building in Five, and maybe that's just what they do, when the numbers take a hit. Round up anyone they can find.

There's a two day old bruise flowering over her cheekbone, and when she looks up at him her eyes fill with fear. Uncertainty. He crouches down in front of her and holds out a hand.

"C'mon," he offers quietly. Her hands don't uncurl from around her legs.

The initial terror is something else. He experienced it first-hand, unfortunately for him.

But he can help her. Protect her. He wants to, if only she'll let him.

If she lets him, he'll never stop.

* * *

 **14\. Sinner.**

They're told certain things - rarely do they listen to them.

Luca doesn't remember getting Meritt back because all he remembers is them throwing his unconscious body out of the back of a van, half-starved and bleeding from more than one place, the bright pinpricks of needle marks stark against his paper white skin.

This is a truce. That was the agreement, worked out over several months.

It takes him two seconds to grab Meritt, to tell everyone to open fire.

It takes him two seconds, to start a war.

* * *

 **15\. Replacement.**

Seren never feels like a replacement.

She should, and sometimes she does, but not to everyone else. At first she can't help but think that Luca only came for her to try and fill the hole that Meritt left, because no one else had a hope in hell of doing it.

She doesn't though, either. Her and Meritt are completely different shapes, and just because she had the opportunity to love him once, not for enough days, that doesn't mean she can. There's not enough time in the world for her to re-shape herself into something that will fix everything he left behind, too many jagged edges in too many places.

She wishes there was, though.

* * *

 **16\. Revelation.**

It takes a while, before she finally caves and goes back to Two.

Her home has become the most dangerous place for her to be, but Luca agrees to take her back, and she's not about to refuse that. She sneaks in through a second story window while he waits on the roof and nearly gives Laz a heart attack in the middle of the hallway, because she expected him to be _asleep_. He nearly falls back down the stairs, hands outstretched, looking at her like she's the damn antichrist. He ends up on the floor before letting her say a single word, muttering over and over that he must be dreaming, because his sister disappeared eight months ago and the girl in front of him now can't be the same person.

She ends up on the floor with him, clutching him tight, and she thinks he might be crying, but she's just as close. He makes her call Corvis, because he's too hysterical to get anything out other than vague noises.

She hears the line click and holds her breath. "Laz, it's three in the morning."

"It's not Laz."

There's a sudden intake of breath on the other side of the line, and then it goes dead. She watches the time tick by, one arm around Laz and one hand still holding onto the phone, and less than seven minutes later she hears the front door open, almost but not quite silent. She hears her brother's footsteps scouring the first floor before they hit the stairs, and hardly even sees him before he grabs her, plucking her off the floor and out of Laz's arms, her feet dangling in the air.

There's a lot of things she has to tell them, and she doesn't have very long to do it.

Right now, none of that matters.

* * *

 **17\. Morning.**

"I don't wanna go," Seren mumbles.

Luca rolls over to where she's face-down in the pillow next to him, apparently trying her best to smother herself before the sun comes up.

"You don't really have a choice."

"Yeah, right. Like you'd really force me to go if I didn't want to."

He wouldn't. He also knows that she's said the same words half a dozen times over the past few days, and while she's going back to Two she doesn't really want to. She will, because she has to, but it's not what she wants. It's not what any of them want, especially him, but he doesn't really have a choice in the matter either. They have to do this. _She_ has to do this. She's the only one who really can.

He scoots closer and grabs her around the waist, pulling her back to him. She doesn't let go of the pillow, but she leans her head against his when he presses his face into her bare shoulder, and that's good enough.

They still have a few hours.

They still have until the morning, before everything changes.

* * *

 **18\. Graveyard.**

There's a pit somewhere out in the woods filled with all of their bodies. That's what scares Karsi the most.

Someone tells her about it when she's been there not even a full day, one of the women who brought her in. No one shows her it, but she hears about it constantly. She wonders how far out it is, who's job it is to take people out there, how many bodies they toss it in daily. Who starts digging a new hole when they fill the current one up.

She never sees it. She's only there for a week, after all. But it's the one thing she still thinks about, so many years later.

* * *

 **19\. Convict.**

Mac gets arrested two days after his nineteenth birthday.

A group has been running drugs through the fields of Nine for years now. Six of them get caught in the span of two weeks, and the rest of them go into hiding. Of all the things to get caught for, and it's because they're trying to save people's lives. The government's been letting people die for years now, and so many of them are sick of it. So many of them are just trying to do better.

The fields go quiet. Finally they're home free, after another month of hardly moving at all.

He's getting ready to go out again when his door gets kicked in.

* * *

 **20\. Tomorrow.**

Alessia's always had a vision for the future.

She never clings to things she knows she won't get. She threw all of that away a long time ago, the first time they put a gun in her hand. Her dreams were never very grand - even in Two, people end up doing things that they never wanted more often than not. It's not the city of dreams, not a place unlike any other. It's the same type of prison every other place is, a little more gray and cold than all the rest.

That doesn't stop her from hoping, though. One day this will all end. She's not sure if it'll end tomorrow or years from now, but it's not the length of time that matters. It's just that it happens, eventually.

And that's enough.

* * *

 **21\. Skeleton.**

They need a proper place to live, eventually.

Maybe not 'proper' because none of them really know the definition of the word anymore, not after so long, but something safe. Six feels right, and not just to Luca. Not just because his sister is close by, and everything else he once knew. Three quarters of Sector Nine is abandoned anyway, has been for a long time, and the few people that live here are far on the opposite side. Far away from where they're going to settle. No one will ever know they're here.

The warehouse is a little bare bones, the main floor cavernous. The smallest noise echoes through the whole place. It stretches up several floors, doors leading to unknown places.

"It smells in here," Linnet says.

"Maybe you should leave, then," Fenton suggests, and Luca assumes the vague scuffling behind him is Linnet attempting to bodily punch him through the floor, which probably won't work too well in a place like this.

"I like it," Seren announces, and he smiles.

"Yeah. Me too."

* * *

 **22\. Anomaly.**

Merrit's always been different than the rest of them.

Kane knows it. If he didn't know it he wouldn't love him, not the way he does. But it's worse when he comes back, when he realizes there's no thump of a heartbeat underneath his hand, when he's as cold as a dead body always is.

"You don't know what I am now," Meritt says. "You don't know what they did to bring me back."

"Neither do you," Kane fires back. All they know is that he still bleeds like a normal human, still moves like one, but something about him is inherently _not._

If that's what he has to accept to have him back then Kane will accept it, every morning and every single night.

* * *

 **23\. Identity.**

She wasn't born Audrel Idelson, but that's the last name she had before she got caught.

Her mother gives her up two hours after she's born and the nurse names her Dasia, no last name because there's no one to claim her. She bounces around with that name until she hits thirteen. During the winter of the 150th she's going by Liotta, because two months ago she went combing through the databases in the Justice Building and now they're looking for her. Kaylin makes two friends, one of which dies in the 152nd and the other of which she never speaks to again. Nell collapses the interfaces between one of the higher-ups in Three and his client in the Capitol, and loses him half a million dollars in the process.

Aleta accidentally causes a District-wide blackout that lasts for two and a half days, and she crosses the name off the list.

She's eighteen, and Audrel finally feels right. She doesn't run when they finally figure out her name.

* * *

 **24\. Disarm.**

Mac's less surprised than he thought he would be when someone four and a half years younger than him kicks his ass in fifteen seconds flat, takes every single weapon they had just given him, and doesn't even look impressed with himself afterward.

Meritt never goes easy on him. Not that Mac would ever ask him to.

* * *

 **25\. Oxygen.**

Fen thinks he's finally pissed off his very last person.

The guy's twice his size and age and has the right mind to "teach him a lesson," whatever the fuck that even means. He slams his head into the wall and now his fingers are pressing right up against the edge of his windpipe, digging in harder and harder—

His vision is starting to blacken around the edges, fade further and further inwards.

The hands get ripped away. Fen crumples to the ground instantly.

His head is spinning, his breath coming in choked, wheezing gasps, but he still sees Alessia punch the guy so hard in the face that he goes stumbling back, nearly into the opposite wall. Not once in these past few months has he seen her lift a hand against anyone.

Another pair of hands drop on his shoulders and hold tight. Audrel's got him now, and she wipes a hand through the mess of tears all over his cheeks. He can still hardly see.

"Just try and take a deep breath, we got you."

He can hear someone yelling, receding footsteps and then Alessia drops down onto the ground next to him, bloody knuckles and all. She smiles grimly.

He remembers what Hollis had told him _, no one goes after our own_ , and knows that she really wasn't lying.

* * *

 **26\. Underground.**

Until they break you, the sunlight is something you give up on.

Three quarters of the base is underground for a reason. In your early years they keep you down there, in the times between when you're allowed out in the dead of the night, always to kill someone or to hurt someone or to do something terrible. You live there, breathe there, exist there.

Once the higher-ups are satisfied you're theirs, they let you out. You move back up into the world of living, reclaim a little piece of space that is officially yours. For a lot of people, that time comes too late. Finally crawling their way back up doesn't do anything.

But for some people, the sun rises, and it reawakens something.

* * *

 **27\. Railroad.**

He has no idea how he's expected to handle all of this.

He knows what it's like to care for his family, to help out when he needs to, but he's not his mother. When she dies he's freshly eighteen and just expected to deal with it, raise both of his siblings like that was something he was just meant to do.

There's been rumors flying forever. About something far, far away from Six. A place for people who have nothing left, nowhere else to go.

So Luca gets on the train, in the middle of the night.

He gets on the train, and makes the mistake of looking back.

* * *

 **28\. Champion.**

When Seren has unscrambled her brain long enough to hear the majority of their stories, they're the only thing she can focus on.

Every single one of them has been through things she can't imagine. She thinks of the things she's gone through in comparison, and they seem so small.

She's nothing special. Not compared to them. She won the Hunger Games, and that's it.

* * *

 **29\. Survival.**

They're taught it from the beginning - no matter what you do to a target, you never leave the scene without checking for a pulse.

Luca never does.

It takes a special kind of person to look death in the face and not crumble and collapse underneath the weight of it's gaze. He's always believed the same thing; if someone can live through what a Sentinel does to them, then they didn't deserve to be targeted in the first place.

In most cases, anyway.

* * *

 **30\. Family.**

It's a proven thing - Alessia cannot do _anything_ without them managing to disrupt it, somehow.

"Alright, family," she announces. "Discussion time."

She washes her face for all of three minutes and comes back out into the main area to find every single one of them asleep. It's usually never _that_ synchronized, with their terrible sleeping habits, but that's what happens when you group them all together, some of them half on top of someone else, and leave them alone.

She wishes she could say something stereotypical, like _I hate this_ _family_ , but even as good of a liar as she is, no one would believe it.

If any of them were even awake to hear it.

* * *

 **31\. Burning.**

Meritt's parents both die in a house fire that he and his sister somehow survive, and he never stops wondering if it was because of the one candle flame he left burning long into the night.

* * *

 **32\. Exhaustion.**

He's gotten used to being in the space between awake and asleep.

It feels like that's the only place Meritt really exists anymore. His body is heavy, laden down with whatever drug they last shot into the side of his neck, the metal table under his back familiar, ice cold to the touch but no colder than he always is now. There are two voices, both drifting in through the door, the noise of someone tinkering around with something to his left.

He stretches his fingers, and they move.

Someone forgot to restrain him. His hands and wrists are free, his feet too. He could try and make a run for it - he might get further than he did last time. He cracks his eyes open. There's a tray of surgical tools just to his left, and he reaches out and grabs the scalpel, tucking it back against his side. The person in the far corner of the room is unfamiliar, and he closes his eyes as she turns around. Starts coming back to him.

Closer, closer. She hasn't noticed. They never notice.

He moves, when she nearly there, and she moves too. That's the exception to the rule. The Capitolites don't move that fast.

The scalpel misses her jugular and catches her across the jaw instead. The door opens behind him, distantly, and then someone's on him. They never come close enough to touch. It's always the prongs of a taser in his shoulder or a dart in the back of the neck. A bullet if they're not in the mood.

"You're okay, Meritt, you're okay, you're safe."

The Capitol wasn't lying. All they do is lie.

"Mac?" he asks, almost too scared to ask.

"It's me, you know me, it's okay. That's Karsi, she's not going to hurt you."

She's bleeding down her neck, now, and none of this makes sense, and Mac's arms won't loosen up around him, but there were two voices out in the hallway, and he turns around, and—

"Kane?"

* * *

 **33\. Reality.**

"We'll get out of here," Carnelia tells him. It's a thing she tells him less and less, over the years.

His sister's always been quietly determined, fearless when she wants to be. But they've been here a week, and nothing's happened. As more minutes trickle by Meritt's more and more certain that she's telling him lies, even if she doesn't realize it yet. She doesn't realize that this is their life yet.

"We'll go back," she continues, and he stops listening. "We'll get back to One. I don't know how, but we will."

They never go back.

* * *

 **34\. Without.**

Luca only walks back into the trees as fast as he does because he doesn't want to watch her leave.

He goes back into the safety of the trees and gets back into the car, tosses the keys into the now empty passenger seat, and smacks his head off the steering wheel for good measure.

By the time the radio crackles to life a half hour, forty-five minutes later, his breath is frosting the air in front of him.

"Luca? Where are you?"

He reaches for the keys and puts them in the ignition, the car rumbling to life underneath him. He doesn't say anything, but he knows Audrel heard the car start. She knows he's been sitting here the entire time, wishing he could climb over the fence himself and go bring her back.

"Be a few hours still."

"Her radio went dead. She must've trashed it. She got in safely."

Safely. He wants to laugh. Seren's not safe in Two, not anymore.

He turns the car around and drives off without her anyway, and he's never hated the silence more than that moment.

* * *

 **35\. Vision.**

"Alright, Fen, hand 'em over."

Fenton looks up at Mac very, very innocently, and for the first two weeks he was here it worked like a charm. It no longer works like a charm.

"Hand what over?"

Mac stares at him, and continues staring. No wonder Hollis and this kid get along so well, if it took them all two weeks to realize it was even happening. The only reason he even put it together was because he was sick and tired of only being able to half-see, and he knows no one else would've actually taken his glasses.

Fenton smiles up at him, and then takes off.

* * *

 **36\. Silence.**

Orick hasn't heard out of his left ear since the day he almost hit the fence. He's loved Linnet for longer than that.

He doesn't know what she did; killed someone, hurt someone, tried to get out of Eleven. He wouldn't put it past her. All he knows is that he's watching the girl who's been in his life since he could barely walk get taken away, out past the fence. No one knows what happens to the people who get taken out past the border, but everyone knows they're never seen again.

There's a reason people aren't allowed within fifty feet of the thing. He starts running anyway.

It takes one of the Peacekeepers a second too long to realize, and by then he's gone. The people here will always be faster than the ones they bring in from the Capitol. These fields are theirs, to keep and to watch over every year.

He's three feet from the fence, can imagine what the metal will feel like underneath his fingers, when something cracks into the side of his head.

* * *

 **37\. Siren.**

Hollis spends twenty minutes looking for Kane when Audrel tells her that they're all in danger of dying to no avail.

The siren's going off in the base, the one that only starts blaring when they're in the worst kind of lockdown imaginable. Hollis knows what the other people down here don't, though. They're trying to keep them down here. Trying to kill as many of them as they can in one swoop. She's got Fenton and everyone else is with Alessia, but Kane's still missing. Probably blacked out in a corner somewhere, purposely hiding from her.

She's going to bring Fen to the surface with the others, and then come back down here and find Kane. She's not letting him die, even if that's what he wants.

They take two, three steps out of the building and nearly get hit by a car.

Fen drags her back at the last second and into the doorway, but all she can see is Kane's very wide eyes through the front windshield.

"I'm going to fucking kill you!" she yells, but he pops the passenger door open and she shoves Fen in, watches him tumble head over heels into the back while she climbs into the seat.

"What's happening?"

"Tell you in a second. Opposite side of the clearing. Everyone's there already. Are you even fit to be driving right now?"

He puts the car in reverse and shakes his head at the same time. Figures.

* * *

 **38\. Addition.**

The last person they tried to add, besides Karsi, died two weeks in.

It's not the first person they've lost.

Her name's Vera, and that's all they get. After the fact someone has the courtesy to tell them she was hardly a day over 15, and came from one of the worst parts of Twelve. Part of Alessia still believes that the girl came here on purpose, that she knew exactly what she was walking into. She knew death's door was two steps away, and she took the first one.

They don't kill her, and two weeks later she does it herself

* * *

 **39\. Grief.**

It's how it goes - Meritt's not the first person they lose, but he's by far the worst.

Hollis goes looking for Kane in the hours after and doesn't find him. Everyone goes looking, eventually, and he only shows up when they've finally stopped. Neither of them say anything, but she figures there's nothing to say. He doesn't say a word to her for hours on end, after that, hardly looks her in the eye for longer than that.

He built the entire world he lives in now around one person, and Hollis isn't sure Kane knows how to live without him.

* * *

 **40\. Kingdom.**

Kane and Hollis have only officially been let out for two weeks.

Kane has yet to understand what's so great about free reign when all that's around you is the woods. Hollis begs to differ, and drags him out to a cliff face with a several hundred foot drop. For being a sniper, he really doesn't like heights.

She's also standing very close to the edge. It feels like he can't breathe.

"Can you come back here?" he asks, and she ignores him. No surprise there, but she edges her toes right to the edge of the rock and spreads her arms out. He's never thought of Hollis as particularly suicidal, but did he ever really expect to have a best friend who killed six people? Not really.

"This is all ours, Kane," she says, sounding very excited. The trees? Maybe a Seven kid has more reason to be excited about that than him. "It _is."_

He doesn't want to believe her, because they just spent months locked up, pushed to their limits, killing innocents.

This is a lot more than he thought he would ever see again, though. And he wants to believe it.

* * *

 **41\. Executioner.**

They weren't the only ones who survived the bombs.

The first and only time they let Meritt out of the Capitol comes just shy of nine months after they brought him back. Then, he doesn't know that anyone he cares about is even alive. All he knows, all he's told, is a name and a location and to kill the person at the other end of it.

They bring him to the outskirts of Eight, and let him go. They put a tracker in his arm just for this occasion, just like the arena. They'll find him, if he runs.

It takes him two hours to find her, and she doesn't run either. She looks surprised for all of two seconds at the sight of him before she starts laughing, almost incredulously. Or maybe out of sheer insanity. It's not a stretch, coming from their kind. He'd spoken to Khia maybe half a dozen times, back at the base. Never in serious conversation. Just enough to know her, but not to know she dared survive.

She sits down on the ground in front of him, waiting for the shot that'll end her life. None of them ever had any instincts of self-preservation.

"So what, you're the Capitol's lapdog now? You've graduated, finally? You like doing their jobs for them?"

He gets back to the Capitol convoy a number of hours later, the blood on his hands from a young man who walked out of the back entrance of a bar and right into his arms. He hopes the blood will be enough to cover it up, enough to give her sufficient time to run, and disappear for good.

It's more than enough.

* * *

 **42\. Distance.**

They're 1,197 miles from District Nine when they offer to take her home.

It's been half a day, since the entire base exploded somewhere behind them in ash and fire. A week since she got taken from Nine. Luca still hasn't shown up yet, and for some reason thinking about it terrifies Karsi. She's only met him properly twice, really, and it terrifies her.

It's only been a week. She could go back. Her family would want answers that she wouldn't know how to give, but she could take her life back. Forget all of this happened, forget these people that have taken care of her for no reason at all other that she was given to them.

She tells Linnet not to turn the car around, and she doesn't.

They hit 1,198. She doesn't regret it.

* * *

 **43\. Catch.**

Kane doesn't realize he loves him, completely and totally loves him, until Meritt saves his life.

It's the first time but far from the last, and Kane shouldn't love something that has blood all over it's hands and doesn't blink when it slices someone's throat open, but everything's been backwards in the past few years and he's not about to start questioning this.

He realizes it before he ever even kisses him, before he spends a whole year holding the words close, before love even properly makes sense.

But it doesn't need to make sense for him to feel it.

* * *

 **44\. Release.**

Meritt doesn't understand how Kane's spent two and a half years wanting him back.

He's a broken, disgusting thing, and there's nothing else to it. Kane doesn't love him, Kane loves the idea of him, the one that existed before, even though that was hardly any better. His emotions are fucked beyond repair and he spends so long shoving him away, trying to get him to stay away, because Kane doesn't deserve this. He deserves anything else.

"He's never going to stop loving you," Seren says one day, and he wants to cry and punch something and also hate her, but he can't. Seren's one of the few people he can look in the eye, because she saw everything he did in that arena and never looked away. She still isn't.

"He shouldn't. It's not right."

"Fine, then it's not right," she insists. "It's not. Sometimes we don't always do what's right. Sometimes we just do what makes the most sense to us even if it's the most screwed up thing in the world. He's not gonna stop. And if you can look me in the eye right now and tell me you don't love him, then I'll back off. I will."

He can't. Somewhere deep down he wants to be able to say it, because it would be so much easier, but he can't. He doesn't deserve love, he doesn't know how to be capable of it anymore. But he gives up, in that moment. Let's himself go and falls right back into it. When he does it feels like the hold the Capitol had on him loosens just the slightest bit and something warmer closes it's arm around him instead.

He doesn't know if that's what love feels like. But he has to figure it out all over again.

* * *

 **45\. Thunderstorm.**

Luca won't go any closer.

It took them eight months to settle down in Six - he's not about to fuck that all up for one person. Even if that person is his sister.

It's raining the next time he sees her. She's on her own, because no one else would dare brave this weather. There's probably something that went wrong in their making, something in their blood that sets them apart. She's the only one to emerge from the back entrance of the school, a half hour after it ended. Her head is down but she's got no hood to cover it, and the downpour soaks her.

She looks up. He nearly runs screaming back into the hills.

There wouldn't be a reason for her to recognize him, five and a half years gone, now. Not if his face hadn't been plastered over every television and wall the past eight months. She stops just before the school fence ends and stares at him. He wants to do a lot of things. A lot of things he doesn't have the option to do, anymore.

He can hardly see her through the rain, and his hair is plastered all along his forehead, but he thinks he sees her lips quirks up, just before she turns the corner and disappears.

Maybe their blood gave them a knack for disappearing, too.

* * *

 **46\. Blackout.**

The entire base goes black, in the half hour before it's destroyed.

Audrel remembers every second of it, as unfortunate as it is. All of her screens die and she's left in the shadows of her room. She hears all of the lights go out in the hallway too, the powering down of every single thing in the building. She's about to throw in the towel and go to sleep when the radio in the corner of the room crackles to life. The only thing that'll still work in here, save for herself.

"Audrel?"

"Any reason you're radioing me at four in the morning, Luca?"

"There's a fleet of Capitol bombers headed for the base. You've got maybe twenty minutes tops before they get there. You need to get everyone out."

There's so many things she could do. Tell him to fuck off, because it's not funny. Ask him where he is, if he's not including himself in that tally. Or turn the radio off and go back to sleep.

She doesn't, though. And it winds up being the only reason they're all still alive

* * *

 **47%.**

It's the survival rate, once you take your first step into the place. They never tell anyone that.

* * *

 **48\. Shatter.**

They never tell him who wins.

In the months after he asks, and never receives an answer. There's only so many people he comes in contact with. The three doctors who brought him back, the woman they call his handler, the general who comes and shock lashes him for four straight days after he kills her. He sees the President three times, never close enough to touch. The third time there's nothing but a glass wall between them, but it won't break. He's tried.

"Can you hear me?"

He doesn't answer her.

"In three days you'll be leaving the Capitol to be transported outside of District Three. It seems your group is still alive."

His eyes leave her heels and rise to her face.

"My group?"

"We're well aware of the dynamics within the Sentinels, Mr. Trevall. We created them. It appears they survived us once. You'll be given back to them under the terms that they surrender. We'll not live in fear of an attack for the rest of our lives - not from your kind."

"They won't believe you."

"We've given them sufficient enough evidence. The trade has already been arranged."

He gets to his feet and as close to the glass as he can manage. She doesn't move.

"You'll hurt them."

"We don't enjoy hurting people, contrary to the games some of us play. Three days."

He's still staring out the glass when she leaves, when the guard slams the door shut and puts him back into isolation. Like always.

He punches the glass and rips open the two day old scabs on his knuckles.

It still doesn't break.

* * *

 **49\. Kindling.**

Hollis burns down the back half of the Justice Building and kills six people in the process.

It was an accident. The government doesn't care.

* * *

 **50\. Crosshairs.**

There are a certain number of truths in this world. Kane only knows a few of them.

He knows that he's hated killing, since the day he first did it, but can't bring himself to hate anyone else for it. He knows that his kill count is _high_ , higher than most people believe it is _._ Sure, Meritt's number, Luca's, even Carnelia's - they're all leagues away. But he knows that even one is too high for him, and he surpassed that a long time ago. He knows that a sniper rifle is like a third arm, once you hold onto it long enough.

He knows what all of the rooftops of Two look like, and which blood splatters in back alleys are from where he put a bullet between someone's eyes.

He knows, deep down, that he only starts firing from a distance because he can't work up the nerve to do it up close.

* * *

 **51\. Smoke.**

The smoke's the only thing they can see, when the bomb goes off half a mile from the base.

It's always a routine test that winds up going the most wrong. They don't all see the initial blast but they all hear it. It sounds like the mountains are going to collapse around them. Kane knows Meritt was out there, that Meritt always seemed to go up in flames whenever it was most inconvenient to everyone else.

People go running, and Kane stays put. Stares off into the distance, where the smoke is consuming everyone else. Meritt always come back. Always.

And he does, not long after. There's too many people, too much chaos, too much screaming. Kane sees him from very far off, covered in his own blood and god know's who else's. Anyone who was caught standing too close. He's hanging off of someone's arm, someone unrecognizable amidst all the ash and smoke, both of them stumbling, half-blind and half-deaf. But Kane grabs him, relieved.

He knows Meritt will get burnt to the ground one day. He's sure of it.

He just doesn't know it's coming sooner rather than later.

* * *

 **52\. Blonde**.

Hollis calls Meritt _blondie_ for three weeks before Kane ever learns his name. It goes on for so long, Kane's almost convinced that that's his actual name, and for once Hollis isn't fucking with him.

When he gets back from the Capitol, his hair is maybe a shade darker.

He doesn't question it, doesn't want to know. No one else ever mentions it, if they ever even notice.

But Kane notices. He always does.

* * *

 **53\. Sleepless.**

Mac and Audrel never sleep.

It takes them both a while to realize, that while they're off on their own in the dead of night, someone else is awake too. Mac only winds up finding out because he walks past her room and the glow of her computer screens is cast under the door, brushing against the edge of his feet.

She doesn't turn when he pokes his head in, and she doesn't tell him to leave when he sits down on the edge of her bed. They hardly even talk - she's got her screens and her keys and he's got his third book of the week, and they don't need to talk.

It's easy. It's their thing. Nobody else is ever awake to intervene.

* * *

 **54\. Plummet.**

They let Linnet free two days after Orick

She spends most of the time in handcuffs, like that'll do any good. Someone steers her in the right direction, and she finds him with a group of other kids about their age. He's not talking.

She still resents him for coming after her, for getting dragged into whatever the hell this is, for burning the image of him crumpling to the ground at the edge of the field behind her closed eyelids. He's one of the few good things in this world, and he shouldn't be here.

Her hand lands hard on his left shoulder, and he jumps a mile, whirling around. His eyes are very wide, terrified. Of her.

"What?" she asks, and it's only then that she notices the swath of bandages cutting a path through the side of his head, the blood staining the edges. He was unconscious most of the ride here, she knew that. But this isn't that.

"What?" she repeats, and his hand comes up to touch the shell of his ear gingerly, as if testing something out, and—

Her heart falls onto the floor.

* * *

 **55\. Devilish.**

Fenton Russo has been a devil since the day he was born, or at least that's what people have always led him to believe.

His mom says as much, jokingly, when he's younger. But then she goes and marries a rich guy from the Square who she swears will do right by the family, and suddenly it's all come to fruition. He hits him, and his mom, more than once, and he starts hitting back. Doesn't do much, but it's better than doing nothing.

One day he'll know every single thing there is to know about this guy. He knows he keeps a gun underneath the mattress and two knives in his second shirt drawer. Two days before his first reaping he lifts both knives, when his step-father goes outside for his usual morning cigarette. When he leaves for work the next afternoon he's hardly turned down the second street before one of his own knives is in his chest, and Fenton leaves him there. The Peacekeepers find him three hours later, dead.

His mother tries to get him to volunteer. He doesn't.

She turns him in, instead.

* * *

 **56\. Strangers.  
**

Luca wants to hate Meritt. He really does.

The fact of the matter is, Luca left Kal behind five years ago. The thirteen year old he knew is completely different from the person present on the screen. When Kal dies it's not really Kal, not the one that Luca knew. How can he blame Meritt for the death of someone he didn't actually know?

It's not Meritt's fault. No matter what angle he looks at it from, it isn't.

The one thing he's certain of is that he lost two brothers, just now. The one he had five years ago, before everything went to shit, and the one that became one along the way. A single burst of fire kills both of them, just like that. A fact that Luca never really makes sense of, no matter how hard he tries.

He tries. But eventually that stops too, and he heads for the Capitol instead.

* * *

 **57\. Wicked.**

Emori's not Prometheus, never will be, but something about her screams it anyway.

If all of them wind up treating her like a little sister because of it, Luca's not going to complain, when her real eldest brother disappeared on her for years and the other one died the year she hit reaping age.

* * *

 **58\. Captive.**

People learn the hard way to never kidnap the medic.

Mac doesn't remember much of the actual event. He remembers something over his face, and knowing all too well it was chloroform, but he had to breathe eventually. He spirals away, seeming to be in another world entirely. The entire time he can hear someone screaming through the earpiece that something is wrong, and it takes him way too long to realize that he's what's going wrong.

He doesn't know where they take him, or how long he's there. No one ever tells him. All he remembers is all the blood and the knife and feeling like it was never going to end no matter how many times he told them he wasn't going to talk. His head is so foggy that when he hears the gunfire, sounding too far off, he doesn't want to harbor any false hope.

When the rest of the group finds him ten minutes later, he's crying with hysterical relief.

* * *

 **59\. Truth.**

Carnelia grabs him, five minutes before he leaves for the Capitol, and tells him they'll all be dead in twelve hours.

He doesn't believe her. He has no reason to believe her. Just because they trust her with every single secret doesn't mean she's going to start spilling them to him.

He sees the hovercrafts leave the Capitol, and traces a finger through the sky. Watches them disappear back the exact way he came.

Luca puts the gun down and starts looking for a line of communication instead.

* * *

 **60\. Yearn.**

They all want a lot of things, now that they can't have them. Luca doesn't know when he started wanting Seren.

* * *

 **61\. Total.**

The Capitol has a list of every person he's ever killed.

He only sees the list once, eight months after they bring him back. It's more than one page long. He can't bring himself to count exactly how many names are on the list. He knows without looking, though, that the list is not complete. Maybe it's not technically his fault, not to the record-keepers, but to him it is.

If the list was complete, they would have put Kal Arker on it, too.

* * *

 **62\. Humane.**

Orick doesn't know how to destroy things.

He thinks Karsi is the first person to ever really understand that.

He was raised his whole life in a family of farmers, knew nothing except the fact that he'd live and die the same way everyone else did, until all of a sudden that's not the truth anymore. He goes from that to being fifteen and raised with a group of murderers and thieves, convicts and everything in-between. They put a gun in his hands over and over and tell him to shoot, and the recoil hits him the same every time.

When he first meets Karsi she's sobbing, pretty much like he was when they first brought him in. She's too young to be in the thick of this, too fragile. Someone will put their hands on her and break her, just like that, without even realizing.

Everyone except them, and him. He wouldn't know how to even if he tried.

* * *

 **63\. Details.**

Kane's always been an artist.

It's nothing more than a hobby. He can't afford it to be anything other than that, not before, not during, not after. It's one of the few things that can pull him from this world, if only for a few minutes, but that time is something he needs. Something he craves, to escape the things he's doing every day.

It's never full things. It's always Mac's hands curled around the edges of a needle or the curve of Hollis' mouth, before she lights the match, or Meritt's eyes. Too often it's his eyes, and Kane wonders, months and months after he's gone, if he only keeps drawing them so he doesn't forget what they look like.

* * *

 **64\. Mountains.**

"It's kinda nice to see something that isn't Two," Seren tells him.

It's cold, not quite spring but not bad enough to be winter, either. They're finally getting to stretch their legs and Luca finally doesn't feel like she hates him for dragging her into all of this mess. The wilds outside of Three are pretty damn flat, if you ask him, and even more unimpressive. Even Audrel hates them, and she grew up here.

Seren has the same thing he had in his eyes, though, when he left Six. The desire to get away. The desire to find something more. When you grow up shielded by the mountains it's probably pretty hard to cope with the fact that there's so much on the other side.

"Glad you're enjoying it, then," he says, and is quite impressed with himself when she smiles.

He's less impressed by her wandering off again, to look at something he's probably looked at a thousand times, but he'll live.

* * *

 **65\. Lesson.**

As terrible as it is, Karsi's grateful she got to skip the worst of it.

They all tell her things, about getting beaten to a pulp and dragged around and tortured to teach them a lesson about how not to break in the future. If they had the chance to do those things to her, she wouldn't have survived.

She likes being alive, thank you very much. And she doesn't even mind the life she's living.

* * *

 **66.** **Wind.**

Seren doesn't hear him coming.

A fact she's still irritated by to this day. She was awake anyway, just having passed by Cicely sleeping soundlessly on the couch, when Luca grabs her. A hand over her mouth and a whispered voice in her ear telling her that _if she makes so much as a sound he'll have to kill everyone in this house, everyone waiting just outside_ , and she has no idea why that's an issue, after the things he did earlier.

She killed five people too, and reminds herself that he's no much more of a monster than she is.

There's the shadow of a Peacekeeper, out the front bay window. He does not turn around.

It takes him less than twenty minutes to convince her to go with him, because she only knows how to exist in places she could only imagine. Not in this city, not back in Two, not in the arena. Not in anywhere that she knows exists.

The house is cold the next morning when Cicely walks into her room, and the window still open, the curtains still moving in the breeze.

* * *

 **67\. Broken.**

Luca doesn't know what the word casual even means.

The first time Seren walks over and kisses him like it's nothing, in front of the entire group, he nearly has a conniption. It's not like they don't all know, it's not like it's a secret. Something about it, though, is so real that is nearly terrifies him, whereas she thinks nothing of it at all. She never does.

"God, Seren, you fucking broke him," he remembers Hollis cackling, and that had sent everyone else into a wild frenzy, too many sharks in the water all looking to torment him.

Seren had started laughing at him too. He wasn't angry about it.

* * *

 **68\. Shield.**

Before Karsi, pretty much all of them have taken _something_ for Mac.

It's the general rule of thumb. Your medic's kind of useless when he's the one bleeding all over the place. Usually it's bullets in places that aren't too convenient, but not life-threatening, or the scrape of a knife a hair away from something vital.

There's another thing that comes with it - it means Mac works three times as hard to keep them all alive, because he's not sure if he deserves what they're giving up to him.

He might not deserve it, but that's just the way it is. And he's good at keeping people alive.

* * *

 **69\. Morals.**

"We can't just threaten everyone we see," Alessia says, a little angrily, although that's probably because she witnessed Linnet harassing an innocent shopkeeper into giving her everything on his front counter three hours ago.

They're hungry. But she wasn't that desperate.

"He's fine," Linnet says. "I said I'd pay him back."

"What, in eighty years?" Orick asks.

"Please. I won't be alive in eighty years."

"I'm just saying, you guys need to have some morals. Even once in a while. For me?"

"What's a moral?" Fenton asks, and Luca smacks him so hard in the back of the head he stumbles right into a tree.

* * *

 **70\. Cut.**

One of the doctors slices Meritt's palm open on _purpose,_ directly over the place where the scar would have been from the bloodbath in the first place, and the blood that comes out is almost black. Probably trying to see what they did and did not successfully to do him, besides bringing him back in the first place.

It doesn't scare him as much as it would a normal person.

* * *

 **71\. Gone.**

Kane opens his eyes in the middle of the night, the reaping for the 155th seven hours away, and Meritt's wide awake.

"What are you doing?" he asks, only half-awake himself, and reaches forward to put a hand on his back. Meritt doesn't move for a long moment before he shifts away and then stands up. He doesn't look down at him.

"Just going for a walk. Won't be long."

They all go for walks. They all need to, once in a while. It's nothing that hasn't happened a thousand times.

So Kane goes back to sleep, watches Meritt close the door, and has no idea that that's the last time he'll ever see him, for nearly two and a half years.

* * *

 **72\. Present.**

"We got you something," Hollis announces, and that's about all the warning she gets before Seren nearly gets hit in the head with a bag.

Immediately she's suspicious. Fenton looks way too pleased with himself for her to not be suspicious.

There's two swords in the bag. Darker than the ones she had in the arena, a little longer than the ones she used back in Two. When she puts them in her hands she expects to feel some sense of regret push it's way out, or disgust. But mostly she's touched and a tad emotional, because until now she hasn't really known what to do here. Where to fit. If she fit at all.

"Do I even want to know where you got these?" she asks, voice a little thick, and Fenton shakes his head, frantic.

"Nope. Please don't tell Luca."

* * *

 **73\. Summer.**

"Fen, if you don't put me down—"

Karsi shrieks as Fenton dangles her even further over the water. Not really a lake but not just a puddle either. They only saw it because Linnet nearly drove right through it.

"You know I can't swim, _seriously_!"

Even if he does drop her into the water, it's only two, maybe three feet deep, and he's going down with her anyway. They all know it. Damn Four kids and their affinity for water and dragging everyone else in with them. He hits his growth spurt and suddenly he's taller than people, finally, and now he's taking full advantage of it.

They don't do days off. In five minutes they'll have to get moving again. But right now they're enjoying themselves.

And no one's going to interrupt it.

* * *

 **74\. Winter.**

It's their first winter out of the base.

One of the rovers hasn't started for three days and the other broke down two miles back, buried in the snow. Even if they had both Kane doesn't imagine they'd be split up anyway. It's freezing. He can hear Linnet fiddling with something in the front seat, but doesn't open his eyes to check. Hollis shifts under his arm, and then Seren under hers.

"I'm gonna die," Mac says, very calmly. He hasn't lifted his head out of the front of his jacket for two hours, and while Kane doesn't think he's serious he also wouldn't be surprised if he was. Not a single one of them have stopped shivering since the cars stopped.

The back door opens, a frosty gust of wind blowing over all of them, and Luca jumps back inside, scattering snow over everyone's legs.

"Do not come anywhere near me," Audrel hisses, and then kicks him in the shin.

It's almost funny. Almost, but not quite.

* * *

 **75\. Mask.**

"Just because they call you reaper doesn't mean—"

"Don't say it."

"You don't even know what I was going to say!" Hollis insists, and then yanks the skull mask out of Luca's hands. "Seriously, though. You don't look mysterious, or alluring, or whatever the hell you were aiming for. You look like a douche."

He snatches the mask back out of her hands, and Linnet snickers. "This is why I don't ask your opinion on anything."

"I'm just saying. It's not Halloween, so why would you—"

"Shut the fuck up, Hollis."

* * *

 **76\. Retribution.**

Lucien is three days older than Luca, and those days make all the damn difference in the world.

Somewhere, in another universe, they'd be like brothers. A package deal, the demon twins. That is not this world.

Lucien nearly kills him a month after they meet. He spends almost three days unconscious after it, his head nearly split open, all because he's too young and too in over his head and too fucking stupid to not fight back.

They don't let them near each other, not after that incident, but he sees him enough. Enough to know that he's going to return the favor one day, as long as it takes. Those three days will always exist but one day he'll catch up in all the ways it counts. They're two different breeds of monsters, and he'll throw himself off the cliff right alongside Lucien if it means gaining any distance. And he will.

He will. There's no other option.

In here it's fight or die, and he's not dying.

* * *

 **77\. Wild.**

The lessons they're taught are almost always sporadic, unplanned.

They almost always come in the time Audrel is actually sleeping.

The first time the instructor drags her out into the hallway, screaming, to see who down the hall has the quickest reaction time. The second time it's the same guy, unfortunately for her, and he smashes every single piece of her equipment trying to get a reaction out of her. Trying to see if she'll crack.

She's just finished putting her stuff back together when he comes back for the third time, but this time she's secured a knife under her desk, so she turns around and stabs at him, wildly, the second he walks through the door.

He doesn't die, tragically. But he also doesn't come back, and he never looks at her again.

* * *

 **78\. Oblivion.**

Kane never watched Meritt die.

They don't broadcast the Games in the base, never have, and Kane's glad for it. He learns, of course, and listens. Every single thing Meritt does and lives through Kane knows about, because that's just how the two of them work.

He locks himself away two and a half hours before Meritt dies, and he never watches it, but he knows. He knows it because it feels like a black hole has opened up the second it happens and is swallowing him from the inside out. It leaves a hole in his chest after it finishes destroying him and through what's left behind there's a hand reaching in, squeezing and pulling at his heart, and the feeling never stops.

And, if things worked how they should, it never would have. But Kane's not about to fight the universe for what happens instead.

* * *

 **79\. Void.**

Finding out you were clinically dead for nearly a month can screw with your head **.**

Everyone else just kind of accepts it - it's not like they have a choice. Meritt's been put back together, re-stitched, his brain pulled and prodded at. He's not the same, that would be asking too much, but he's not completely different either. He wakes up with no memories of what happened, nothing except the flicker of the flame before it came to life and everything before it.

Sometimes he looks in the mirror and wonders just exactly how much of him he really is, and how much of it is other people.

Sometimes he sits there, stares at himself, and wonders how so there's still so many things inside him, when he feels so empty.

* * *

 **80\. Guardian.**

For a very long while, Mac has absolutely no idea why Luca's been allowed to run anything.

Even to this day he thinks it's sometimes, but it's not until he nearly blacks out in the middle of the hall from lack of sleep that he really gets it. Three nights ago he gave his bed to a pair of kids who are fresh into things, eyes terrified, and he hasn't really cared. Perpetual insomniacs don't need sleep.

He finds Luca a few minutes later when he walks right into him and nearly knocks the two of them to the ground. Luca catches him by the shoulders and looks at him funny. Mac has no idea why, absolutely zero.

"When was the last time you slept?"

Was it those three nights ago - or before that? Mac has no idea.

Mac doesn't get to string together a coherent answer, either, before Luca's dragging him off in the opposite direction. He wakes up the next morning in Luca's bed, no sign of Luca, with zero recollection of ever walking there in the first place.

He doesn't see him till six hours later, but he knows Luca didn't sleep. He knows a lot about what that looks like. But not today.

* * *

 **81\. Awaken.**

Carnelia is still one of the most terrifying people Luca has ever come across, even above Lucien. Lucien's the one that nearly kills him but it's Carnelia that's there when he wakes up. She's the one that pulls the mask off his face and tells him to learn how to start breathing on his own.

 _No one's going to help you after this,_ she says, and he still remembers every word.

She's wrong, in the very least. But he still has nightmares about it.

* * *

 **82\. Ritual.**

Karsi knows that everyone gets a new name, and she'll never get hers.

It's probably a scare tactic moreso than a secret type of code, even though that's what they always call it. Whatever it is, it doesn't really matter. Everyone gets one, down the road. It's no official ceremony but it happens all the same, or so she's told. Over and over again. She wonders how they haven't run out of words to use, yet.

They're two months into the woods, probably lost, and she's still figuring out her place, same as Seren. Orick calls her _wallflower_ once, and it kind of sticks.

She figures that's the best word she's ever going to get. She doesn't think the old place had one that fit her, anyway.

* * *

 **83\. Anniversary.**

Luca disappears on the same day every year.

Seren doesn't notice the first two years. The third she only notices after everyone goes to sleep, and there's no one awake to explain it.

The fourth time, she asks.

"Why May 27th?" she asks. It's seven in the morning and Mac's the only one awake. She woke up not long ago herself, and the other side of the bed was already cold. He'd been gone a while. If he ever even went to sleep.

"S'when his mom died," Mac says, not even looking up from what he's doing. Judging by that, he's been doing it since forever. It's something they just all got used to. It makes sense, at least. That's the day that everything changed for him, the day that put him where he is now. She doesn't really blame him for isolating himself, when it hits year after year.

He gets back just before midnight, and she doesn't even let him shed his coat before she presses up against his back, arms wrapping around his waist. He doesn't say anything but he reaches up to squeeze her hands where they're joined in the middle, and that's good enough.

* * *

 **84\. Spineless.**

Kane doesn't have the guts to ask Meritt what the Capitol did to him, but he can see it in his eyes.

It only makes him feel worse for not asking.

* * *

 **85\. Idea.**

They spend many weeks trying to find something for Karsi to do.

She's not a fighter, not a defender. She released the clutch and nearly ran over Orick when Linnet tried to get her in the car. There's a difference between terrified and useless, but if someone's determined to blur the line between the two, it's definitely Karsi.

So Mac gets an idea.

She looks as if he's grown a second head when he presents her with the very minimal roll-up that is his medical supplies and instruments. It takes him a very long time to even get her used to the idea, of protecting instead of killing, but she seems to like the idea as much as he does. More than one medic wasn't usually a thing, in their squads, but Mac isn't sure why they didn't do it earlier. You always need a back-up option.

Two months later he gets shot and is bleeding all over Luca's hands, and she saves his life.

* * *

 **86\. Liar.**

"Can you come out from under the car, Lin? Gotta ask you something."

Linnet pauses under the car, and then there's a whole lot of swearing as she attempts to wiggle her way out. Or at least that's what Orick thinks she's doing - it could be any number of things, judging by the noise. When she finally pulls her way free a solid thirty seconds later she's covered in grime and grease and there's a red mark in the middle of her forehead where she must've smacked it off of something.

He's also forgotten what he was going to ask her.

"We need to get you one of those rolling under the car things."

"You mean a creeper?"

"That is not what that's called."

She stares at him, and he can't tell if she's waiting for the question or if she's trying to prove a point. She also doesn't look like she's kidding at all. He turns around to go.

"What about the question?" she asks.

"Gotta find out if you're lying to me first, hold on."

* * *

 **87\. Stolen.**

Hollis randomly produces three bottles of some very expensive looking, straight whiskey nine months after everything goes to shit.

It goes about as well as you'd expect.

* * *

 **88\. Spiral.**

They all wonder, more than once, if there was ever a chance to save Carnelia.

It was a lot closer than people would think. If she had stayed with them, things would had been different. Maybe she'd be okay, as okay as okay was. Living a life that didn't revolve around the hunt and the kill and the few things that came in-between it.

It'll all haunt them until the day they die, but she started her descent long before they ever came around.

* * *

 **89\. Mission.**

Luca doesn't like the idea of the twelve of them out there, waging war against the Capitol, but it's not them going out there that's worrying.

Things go wrong on missions all the time. That's just how it is.

He's worried about who's not coming back.

* * *

 **90\. Unlikely.**

Visitors are not a thing Meritt gets very many of.

He gets even less of them when he can hardly see straight. One of the guards put a hole in his lung (on accident, supposedly) two weeks ago, and it still feels like he can hardly breathe. Three different needles stuck into his side to suck the air out and they said he was good to go.

This is the first time in two days someone's appeared on the other side of the glass wall, and they slide a water bottle through the opening at the bottom. He won't grab it until they leave. She says things, though, and they rarely talk. What point is there to talking to someone like him?

"Don't die," she says, at long last. "If you die, I can't get you out."

It takes him so long to turn his head that by the time he does all he sees is the door closing and a flash of silver-blue hair, before his vision goes black again.

* * *

 **91\. Detonate.**

Letting Seren go is the trigger that they needed.

By the end of all of this, they are one of the only things that will be left intact, once the dust settles. It's going to take one second to destroy so many things. It's different than Hollis setting a fire - things like that be contained, carefully. Pushed back and put out.

There won't be any going back from this. They've all thought it a dozen times, about how much their lives are going to change, if this works. One last war and then they'll be what, normal? Not a chance.

They won't live normal lives, but they also won't be living ones that are out of control, either.

Maybe, they'll finally be allowed to settle. But not before it goes off in the first place.

* * *

 **92\. Past.**

Audrel manages to get a flickering broadcast of the 160th up in the warehouse, so they know who they'll be rescuing in a few weeks time, and Fenton sees two people he knew, once upon a time.

* * *

 **93\. Cycle.**

It's a weird thing to be a part of: grow up hating the Capitol, same as everyone else. Wind up working for the same people you hate, because of one terrible decision or because you did nothing wrong at all. Kill the rebels the Capitol tells you to, unaware of the fact that they'll soon become them, one day.

It can feel endless, at times. But everything ends eventually.

* * *

 **94\. Haywire.**

Someone has to have thought it, by now, but there's irony behind the fact that the girl who always thrived in chaos is the one so ready to create it all over again. It took a while, for the Games to let go of her. Parts of them will always still be holding tight.

There was a time when Luca thought he was going to regret crawling through the window of that stupid Capitol house, regret asking her to come with him when he had no reason to trust her, and vice versa.

But Luca loves her. It took him so long to admit it, but he does. He really does.

* * *

 **95\. Ruin.**

Meritt only asks one thing, after he comes back, so they take him back to Two.

None of them have been back to the base since it got blown to smithereens. No one's really ever had any desire to. But he asks, when he's been so hesitant to ask _anything,_ so they pack everything up and drive back across the country, even if it's just for one day.

Watching him walk through the ashes, alone, is the moment they all put the past to rest. Put it in the ground, where it belongs.

They'd need years to explain everything they want to accomplish to Meritt, but he knows enough.

"You wanna do it?" Kane asks, before they get back in the car.

"Yeah, I do," Meritt says, without hesitation. Another first.

And, well. That's that.

* * *

 **96\. Mental.**

"Do you think we're in over our heads?" Alessia asks. "We have to be crazy."

"You're the only one of us that's not," Luca responds, because the truth's easy.

"We're possibly about to start a rebellion. Do you not find that even a little bit insane?"

If they weren't insane, this wouldn't be happening. They wouldn't have done it in the first place. They don't do things half-way, certainly not normal ones. The real truth is, he's shocked this didn't happen sooner, with all of them. It was always coming towards them.

"Whole country's fucking crazy," he says quietly. "Where's the harm in making it worse?"

* * *

 **97\. Daybreak.**

It's day nine.

Seren's the first one awake, the second the sun's up. Today will either be the greatest thing they ever pull off, or the worst. There's no telling what will happen, in that arena. No telling if Blair ever believed her or not.

She pulls the little communicator out from where she's shoved it between the mattress and the frame, and then pulls all of the blankets over her head. The door's already locked.

"Do you think he'll actually do it?" she asks, voice soft. Logically, she wouldn't get any sort of response. And she doesn't, not from the ones she knows are waiting just outside the Capitol, ready to come get her. But there's still one person left in Six.

"Yeah," Meritt responds almost instantly. Nothing else.

"Why?"

The silence is so long she's resigned herself to accepting that he's gone back to sleep. She can't even hear his breathing on the other end, but she's gotten used to it.

"Because Two's do stupid things for a living," he says finally, and she has to press her hand over her mouth to avoid laughing.

She can sense the smile on the other end. "See you soon, Seren."

* * *

 **98\. Alive** **.**

Ferrox Mervaine unknowingly gives life to two of the worst things he could have possibly created, when he can feel himself dying in his own home. One that will attempt to destroy the world and everything in it and the other that will cast them out in a wash of fire, giving life back to the people who have been fighting for so many years.

The only issue is, he lives.

Things get infinitely more complicated because he does.

* * *

 **99\. Dead.**

Luca Arker is absolutely, one hundred percent terrified of dying. Not a single person knows it.

* * *

 **100\. Endings.**

It takes several hours before they circle around each other, in the aftermath. Bruised and beaten but not broken like so many times before

They had been listening to the sound of war for years, but now the echoes of battle began to fade into the background, until it was like they had never been there at all. When they finally did begin to glance at each other, it was different. It wasn't filled with dread, or terror. It was something they hadn't yet experienced as a group, as a family. It was the freedom of knowing that a new world stood before them.

Their story isn't about the new world, though. It's about everything that came before, their blood in the country's ground. This was about life carrying on, as difficult as it may have seemed.

They were all supposed to have died. In the Games or in the woods outside of District Two or now, in the middle of this chaos.

But they lived.

They lived as if they had been living this whole time, when they had just found out how to now.


End file.
